Recorded way back in 2016. Music inspired by a rather crappy teddy bear I used to own.

Lullaby?!

This is the first Lone Bass Player song I've written in about 3 years. My usual musical outlet - a duo called Cat Came Back - has kind of (in a very very good way) taken over my musical life over the last year or so. So much so that one day I realised that the only reason I was picking up a bass these days was to finish off a Cat Came Back song. So I have decided to spend some time properly reacquainting myself with my favourite instrument and this is first piece of whimsy to emerge from that.

And So She Mused Upon The Moon

Something different that came out of a recent afternoon experimenting with the horn plug-ins in Logic......

Tunnel Steps

This was a song that was really only just a sketch as I went into the studio to record it and it was a bit plain at that stage truth be told. I told this to the producer who suggested we try some live effects and he pulled out this gizmo and he sat there on the floor twirling various knobs while I played and this is what happened. The thing pictured is called a Sherman Filterbank and is what we use to get the cool sounds on this song.

Sherman Says!

This was a piece of music that was coming together just as yet another pointless and cowardly terrorist attack struck France in November 2015. 
The title comes from the French word - "Merci" which despite meaning "thank you" today, in Old French the meaning of merci is where the English word, “mercy,” derives from.
Image attribution - By Informationswiedergutmachung - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37816536

Mercy

The stompy bass line of this reminded me of a Giant stomping his way as he walked along...Fe Fi Fo Fum!!!! Also I'm a big jazz fan (mostly 50's and 60's hard bop) so borrowing the title of a John Coltrane classic tickled my fancy too. And lastly the title is a bit of a nod to a character from the series by Stephen R Donaldson "The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant" - a giant by the name of Saltheart Foamfollower.

Image - Kaukomieli Posted in The Gap into Mirror Land WikiSaltheart Foamfollower

Giant Steps

This is a piece of music I wrote around the time that David Bowie left us. I was never really a big David Bowie fan but of course I grew up with his music as a big part of the soundtrack of my childhood. Ashes to Ashes, Little China Girl, Space Oddity, etc. But his final album Black Star came out as I was finishing this song off and the songs from that absolutely mesmerised me. And then of course the news came through that he had died shortly after that. So this is not a tribute song, just more like a moment acknowledging that someone legendary was on their way to the world after this one....

Image: https://unsplash.com/photos/zEawlLdVloo?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditShareLink

Major Tom's (Just Like That Bluebird)

This is one of my favourite pieces - I like the naive simplicity of the melody - it's almost embarrassingly simple actually! This song actually started as another song - a much faster song called "Juno" which I tried to record for my first album in 2016 but I wasn't happy with how it turned out so I left it off. One day I started mucking around with it over a slowed down version of the original keyboard layer of the song and I really liked the calm, simple feel to it. As the original version of the song was named after the Juno spacecraft orbiting Jupiter I imagined this little reprise to the song as the soundtrack to Juno's last orbit before it is sent to its final destination - a controlled de-orbit into Jupiter's atmosphere - I believe scheduled for June 2021 at this stage!

Last Orbit

This piece came together in about 30 minutes and was recorded pretty much straight away. Its just a series of bass loops layered over and over and the music was written as a classic upper Blue Mountains mist rolled in through the trees in my back yard. Mist seemed like the perfect title!

Mist

Another song with no real meaning behind the title and as matter of fact I was stuck for one. Eventually I just listened to the piece and there are 3 descending notes in one of the bass loops I play and for lack of a better idea I just went with that concept!

Let's Descend

No great meanings or messages with this piece - it just had a bit of a Japanese feel to me so I thought Japanese Garden was a good title!
I think the combination of the high zingy octave effect and the scale I used gave it an Oriental feel. Also there's never a Haruki Murakami book far away from me at any given time!

Japanese Garden

For some reason I always think about the person in this image when I think about this song. I used to see him at the same time each night - around 3am - as he walked towards the train station in Springwood. He had a really big limp and watching him walk was a hard thing to do (although of course how hard was it for him to actually walk like this each night??). I was driving a delivery van at the time and I would often pass him along the main street as I headed towards my next delivery which was maybe 2 or three hundred metres further down the street. Quite often I would have finished my delivery - unloading the van and locking up the place I was delivering to - by the time this guy caught up to me again, so maybe 10 minutes had passed for this stoic looking person to travel that short distance. I often wondered if I should have offered him a lift each night when I passed him (I should note I often didn't actually have room for him in the front seat!) but how would he have reacted to that even if I could have? Grateful? Offended? Ashamed? Perhaps he was just used to carrying that cross he bore each night?

Fade

Just a bit of fun here. And as the song says, it’s the most tremendous new musical experience you can have....
Found an old collection of bass loops I'd recorded way back in 2015 / 2016 for a song that never quite worked out when I tried to record it. Anyways, for reasons unbeknownst to me now, at some stage over the last 4 or 5 years I sped those loops up and duly forgot about them again.  After getting a new computer last month I decided I should either delete or do something with all the random incomplete or abandoned music taking up disk space. Thusly I dragged a generic drum beat in with the loops and added some old advertisement and movie samples found at archive.org and behold, I created what is the closest I'll ever come to creating a novelty song.
The original music from which the bass loops for this song were taken can be found here:
https://soundcloud.com/graeme-mc-pherson/they-dug-everything-out-of-the-earth

And if you're a glutton for punishment, there's a video for "1 minute 40 seconds" here:
https://youtu.be/J0q-bC2qrbk

1 minute 40 seconds

Most of this piece was recorded in 2016 but I abandoned it until I decided to clean my computer files up recently. I added the vocals and a few horn samples to "finish" it off.
It's "sister" piece which takes the same bass loops, speeds them up and takes it all to a very different place can be listened to here:
https://soundcloud.com/graeme-mc-pherson/1-minute-40-seconds

The original spoken word sample is by "wjoojoo" and can be found here:
https://freesound.org/people/Speedenza/sounds/263544/

They Dug Everything Out Of The Earth

This is my on again / off again solo project composing music based (no pun intended 😜) around the bass.
My main musical "job" is being one half of an indie pop duo called Cat Came Back. 
Please check out my new side project, https://soundcloud.com/cinemata-blue

The Lone Bass Player

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